This is great! She is so spot on with her advice to totally embrace your life and bravely face the challenges that come up. There have been many times since going full time last month that I have been tempted to pull back, play it safe. No more.
I like that she said one must clean up their (old) life completely. This, of course, means one must come clean with their true gender, completely, in the process. This, I gather, she accomplished some time before getting the surgery. For myself, I had to make a commitment, which meant that I needed to be honest with everyone - myself included. Anyway, Ruth had become the woman she was always meant to be even before her surgery, I believe. The surgery was just the icing on the cake.
I am trying to comprehend why many in the male to female gender variant community continue to employ the term crossdresser when female to male persons who do the same thing are not so labeled. If women aren't "crossdressing" when they wear traditionally male clothing, why is a male bodied person doing so when wearing a skirt? I tend to personally see this term as slightly anachronistic and dismissive rather than helpful since there are a series of societal connotations surrounding it which aren't generally positive or helpful. If we are going to move towards a deeper level of understanding and tolerance of all types of behaviour (no matter the percentage of the population which engages in it), we need to update the lexicon as we have done in many other areas of social science. Hence if we are going to less stigmatize a behaviour which has always existed and which occurs with much more frequency than transsexualism, a name change might be in order. Perhaps as a startin
This entry from the transhealth website dates back to 2001 and it offers a very nice dissection of the now mostly debunked but still controversial AGP theory and how this transgender woman could care two cents about it. People who have been trying to marginalize the experience of gynephilic transwomen have pushed for the stigmatizing idea that they are actually perverted men. Well this soul, who couldn't give a hoot either way, isn't buying any of it and her frankness at times had me chuckling to myself as I read her posting. If we ever met I would give her a hug for seeing through the BS but mostly for being herself: "About a year ago I was reading on Dr. Anne Lawrence’s site about a new theory of the origin of trans called “autogynephilia.” This theory asserts that many trans women—and transsexual women in particular—desire reassignment surgery because they are eroticizing the feminization of their bodies. The first thing that struck me about it, of course, was t
Now that I can more dispassionately reflect on arousal patterns in trans people, I think I have come to some conclusions about them. Firstly, there is often an expressed early wish which is repressed (by well meaning parents perhaps) in wanting to be female and that denial builds tension which as puberty is entered can take on sexual overtones. The trans identity is definitely there from the outset and almost certainly biologically sourced, only that the repression produces this effect. Secondly, other forms of gender variance can produce similar outcomes as we can see in the sissy sub-culture where some people infantilize their behaviour by imagining being petticoated boys or dressing up as school girls for example. Again, likely due to repressed wishes becoming sexual fantasy into adulthood. Even Blanchard noted that there was some cross bleeding into his supposedly purely androphilic group with their arousal patterns albeit a smaller percentage than gynephilics who Blanchard erron
I am definitely going to share this on on tumblr!
ReplyDelete😁
DeleteThis is great! She is so spot on with her advice to totally embrace your life and bravely face the challenges that come up. There have been many times since going full time last month that I have been tempted to pull back, play it safe. No more.
ReplyDeleteGreat Marcia good for you
DeleteI like that she said one must clean up their (old) life completely. This, of course, means one must come clean with their true gender, completely, in the process. This, I gather, she accomplished some time before getting the surgery. For myself, I had to make a commitment, which meant that I needed to be honest with everyone - myself included. Anyway, Ruth had become the woman she was always meant to be even before her surgery, I believe. The surgery was just the icing on the cake.
ReplyDeleteIt was the completion of a very long journey
Delete